Mysterium is building a decentralised VPN. What is a VPN? And how is a dVPN different? Find out more.
Related: What is internet censorship?
The last quarter for Mysterium Network has been an eventful one, to say the least. We grew our node network to an unprecedented scale, resulting in many adaptations and changes, especially to our bounty rules.
We have now pivoted our focus away from node acquisition and started working on various implementations of our decentralised VPN application to attract more users and businesses to the network. We also launched our first developer bounties, encouraging entrepreneurs and programmers to take advantage of our infrastructure and build new privacy-focused Web3 tools and products.
As always, there has been an ongoing process of testing, learning and iterating.
Here are the latest updates from our team
First, a little info on our March release (v0.22):
We have added a “pay for traffic” functionality. This means all transactions made in the network are now paid ones. We also tested our micropayments system, using the “pay for time” feature.
An even more advanced NAT hole punching was implemented. After this fix, about 80% of all nodes are able to work out of the box. This is an increase of 50% from previous implementations.
What we achieved in April
We released version 0.31 which introduces one big change and adds a couple of smaller enhancements:
Developing the desktop dVPN app
We’re also actively working on a new desktop macOS dVPN app and are going to release the public BETA soon. You can see the progress of app development in this repo or watch related tasks here.
We also did some work towards reopening our Windows app. You can already download the Windows build and use it as a consumer via CLI. Building the Windows desktop dVPN app is our next task and we’re aiming to complete it by the end of May.
Refining our free (for now) dVPN Android app
Our latest version of the Android app is much more stable and should have much better connection times with nodes running v0.31. By the end of May, we’re going to add more filtering options (e.g. by node IP type) and have some UI enhancements.
Fine-tuning our payments
Thanks to our community, we have found many bugs in our payments implementation. Many of them are already fixed.
We’ve been testing our micropayments solution from the end of December 2019. During the last 4 months we implemented almost all the features of the Hermes protocol (our in-built payments solution) and are going to open source the code at the beginning of June. From then, the network will be able to operate with several Hermes hubs, as we aim to decentralise the network further. This will push us closer towards becoming a fully distributed network, launching on the Ethereum mainnet and utilising MYST as the major payment method.
The logic behind these releases
As we draw closer to mainnet, we have changed our release process. We have scheduled a couple of RC (release candidates) before our final release, with planned upgrades to the whole network. With this change we expect to have more stability and speed, with less things breaking with additional minor releases (e.g. 0.22.1, 0.22.2 …).
Why are we jumping straight from 0.22 to 0.30?
In our last release we added a huge change, making communication between consumers and providers even more P2P, while avoiding centralised communication servers (such as our message broker service).
What's next?
We’re still working hard towards a mainnet release this Summer. This means you can use the P2P dVPN service, and earn when you rent your bandwidth to others. It will be the launch of our unique micropayments infrastructure which enables everyone in the network to pay and be paid in a secure, efficient and private way.
It’s also an open invitation to developers who can see our open source code in action and would like to plug into our global node network to build some exciting new use cases themselves.
You can already try our free VPN for Android here.